Pushing The Pink Police State

The Human Rights Campaign, the gay rights lobby, is denouncing Gene Schaerr, the Utah attorney defending Utah’s stand on traditional marriage because of his religious convictions. The idea is that his religious beliefs have no place in this discussion. The HRC is trying to drive religious people out of the public square. Law prof Eugene Volokh pushes back:

This strikes me as badly wrong, and indeed deeply unfair to religious believers. Lawyers decide to take cases based on their personal moral values all the time. Lawyers decide to take government cases based on their personal moral values, and indeed seek out certain government jobs based on their personal moral values. Pro-gay-rights lawyers might choose to take pro-gay-rights cases based on their personal moral values — including ones that seek to impose a certain moral viewpoint, such as that embodied in various antidiscrimination statutes, on all citizens.

Nor are lawyers whose moral values are based on secular philosophical principles (e.g., a humanist commitment to equal treatment, including legally coerced equal treatment) somehow have special moral or legal rights on this score. Lawyers whose moral values are based on religious principles, or whose commitment to a case is inspired by their religious principles, have precisely the same rights.

Say someone wanted to defended the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in court because he has deep religious beliefs in favor of racial equality — the civil rights movement, of course, had a heavily religious dimension to it. Or say someone wants to defend environmental legislation because of his religious beliefs about human obligation to protect God’s creation. Or say someone wanted to defend state opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act because of his deep anti-slavery religious principles. These lawyers stand on precisely the same moral and legal footing, I think, as lawyers who took the same views out of secular moral conviction.

Amen. Prof. Volokh should visit Ireland, where gay rights fundamentalists have been working hard to push a newspaper columnist who happens to be Catholic to the margins. It all started when Irish Times writer Breda O’Brien wrote a fairly irenic column speaking out against people on both sides of the debate who dehumanize their opponents. Excerpt:

For people who are genuinely homophobic, gay people are the “Other”. For a certain type of liberal, anyone who supports traditional marriage is the Other. In both cases, people fail to understand or relate to the Other as people.

That’s why I was so disappointed in Mary McAleese’s comments as reported in the Glasgow Herald. McAleese is an erudite, intelligent woman and a committed Catholic. It is hard to believe that she really thinks the church’s teaching on sexuality, and in particular, on gay sex, stems from the fact that there are allegedly so many gay churchmen frantically trying to repress their sexuality. As someone with a qualification in canon law, she must know the church teaches that sexuality is ordered towards a certain goal, that of loving and mutual support that binds men and women together so they can best care for their children.

She might profoundly disagree with that teaching, as is her right, but why does she believe the alleged fact that so many priests are gay constitutes a “herd of elephants” in the room? I am not aware of any research that indicates real numbers, but even if 95 per cent of priests were gay, does that mean they are all repressed, stifling their sexuality, and self-hating homophobes as a result?

O’Brien goes on to talk about Spiritual Friendship, a group of and for gay Christians who support the traditional Christian teaching on homosexuality and who seek to live by it. These people exist, and ought to be treated with respect, O’Brien says, not demonized as the Other. She concludes:

I don’t know how gay Christians who do not support gay marriage have the courage to appear on the media. Most of the names they get called couldn’t be printed here, but just check out Twitter any time a gay person who supports traditional marriage is on. Descriptions such as “self-loathing gay religious fundamentalist” are typical of the attacks.

Ironically, in that particular case the epithet was directed at a gay who has also been beaten up on the street for being gay. Sincere disagreement on the nature of marriage is not the problem. Homophobia and intolerance are. Let’s unite to eliminate them.

RO’N: “So much has changed. And I think em a small country like Ireland sometimes we get a bad rap because people think “oh small conservative country blah blah blah”. But actually I think a small country like Ireland changes much faster than a big country because absolutely…I’m..think about it every single person in this audience has a cousin or a neighbour or the guy that you work with who is a flaming queen. I mean you all know one. And it’s very hard to hold prejudices against people when you actually know those people. And Ireland because it’s such small communities grouped together, everybody knows the local gay and you know maybe twenty years ago it was okay to be really mean about him but nowadays it’s just not okay to be really mean about him. The only place that you see it’s okay to be really horrible and mean about gays is you know on the internet in the comments and you know people who make a living writing opinion pieces for newspapers. You know there’s a couple of them that really cheese..”

BO’C: “Who are they?”

RO’N: “Oh well the obvious ones. You know Breda O’Brien [Irish Times Columnist] today, oh my God you know banging on about gay priests and all. The usual suspects, the John Waters and all of those people, the Iona Institute crowd. I mean I just..you know just…Feck Off! Get the hell out of my life. Get out of my life. I mean..[applause from audience] why…it astounds me…astounds me that there are people out there in the world who devote quite a large amount of their time and energies to trying to stop people you know, achieving happiness because that is what the people like the Iona Institute are at.”

BO’C: “I don’t know. I don’t know. I know one of the people that you mentioned there which is John Waters. I wouldn’t have thought that John Waters is homophobic?”

RO’N: “Oh listen, the problem is with the word ‘homophobic’, people imagine that if you say “Oh he’s a homophobe” that he’s a horrible monster who goes around beating up gays you know that’s not the way it is. Homophobia can be very subtle. I mean it’s like the way you know racism is very subtle. I would say that every single person in the world is racist to some extent because that’s how we order the world in our minds. We group people. You know it’s just how our minds work so that’s okay but you need to be aware of your tendency towards racism and work against it. And I don’t mind, I don’t care how you dress it up if you are arguing for whatever good reasons or you know whatever your impulses…”

BO’C: “Because it is what you believe, it’s your faith or that, yeah?”

RO’N: “…it could be good impulses..and you might believe that these impulses are good because you’re worried about society as a whole and all this rubbish. What it boils down to is if you’re going to argue that gay people need to be treated in any way differently than everybody else or should be in anyway less, or their relationships should be in anyway less then I’m sorry, yes you are a homophobe and the good thing to do is to sit, step back, recognise that you have some homophobic tendencies and work on that. You know stop spending so much of your life you know devoting energies to writing things, arguing things, coming on TV to do anything to try and stop people achieving what they think they need for happiness.”

Depictions of LGBT people in the media that in any way infer that their relationships or parenting skills are inferior to those of heterosexuals should be condemned. Unlike in some countries, Irish law does not permit the execution of gay people, but that doesn’t mean homophobia doesn’t exist.

Anti-equality rhetoric both in the media and enshrined in legislation is, in my opinion, directly responsible for physical and verbal attacks on gay people. It creates an invisible atmosphere that gives homophobic people a sense of entitlement. It can be subtle or blatant; it can be words or knives.

“Free speech” is not a free pass to inflict psychological trauma just because you don’t want lesbians or gay people to get married. Opponents of marriage equality are not the victims in this debate.

We know this argument well: speech = violence, therefore to stop violence, we must gag our opponents. That an actual professional journalist, Una Mullaly, a woman who makes her living in a medium that should, by its nature, celebrate free and robust debate, believes this — well, it is shocking.

The Irish reader who sent me these stories says that the Irish Twittersphere has been burning up with people denouncing Breda O’Brien as History’s Greatest Monster. He adds that:

“[I]n the referendum it’s going to be increasingly hard to talk about these things without facing legal sanction: the Law of Merited Impossibility (except that many social liberals here aren’t even bothering with the ‘impossibility’ part – it’s more like “you’ll get what’s coming to you”).

In case you missed it, the Law Of Merited Impossibility is a paradox I discerned from following the debate over gay rights. It says, basically, Christians have nothing to fear from the expansion of gay rights, and boy, do they deserve what they’re going to get.

The Pink Police State is a brilliant concept coined by James Poulos. He explains it like this:

So citizens of a Pink Police State (I should say subjects) are apt to surrender more and more political liberty in exchange for more and more cultural or ‘personal’ license.

In other words, Pinks like O’Neill and Mulally are perfectly willing to support a curtailment of speech rights in service of expanding gay rights — as if the two were in necessary conflict. We have a First Amendment in the US, so there is no chance that the Pinks at the HRC could bring about legislative restriction on the rights of opponents to criticize them. But they can bring tremendous cultural pressure to bear on religious opponents, by insisting that they have no legitimate place in the public square on this debate. The thing is, Pinks, if you will not have Gene Schaerr, then you may not have the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

A cultural and political climate in which someone like Breda O’Brien is not free to defend her faith and to call for tolerance for gay Christians who don’t follow the Homintern line is a culture and a polity that’s well on its way to a Pink Police State. Again, we Americans have the First Amendment, but that only means we cannot be legally sanctioned for stating our views. It means only that; it is perfectly possible to push dissenters to the margins without breaking a single law. And they will do it in the name of Tolerance.

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149 Responses to Pushing The Pink Police State

The Irish were some of the most intensely Catholic people in Europe a generation ago; now they’re some of the most intensely anti-Catholic.
As a Protestant agnostic, I can only hope that when their collective head has stopped spinning it’s pointed forwards.
What a bunch of fanatics and counter-fanatics! Only in Spain and Portugal could you find anything even remotely like this.

You’re pretty clueless about the problems in living people commonly face in their adolescent and young adult years. I’d suggest you give the subject up.

Art Deco: given the level of your engagement with others here, I hesitate in responding – I feel I need a Silkwood Rub afterwards – but for what it is worth: you’re right that problems of disowning could happen among “ordinary people” (spouse of a wrong religion, race or caste); many people suffer from depression; as Rod states, people get bullied in school for any number of reasons, and so on. “It’s the same for everyone.” It isn’t. My favourite line from Tolstoy, paraphrased, sums it up: all happy people are the same; each unhappy person is unhappy in his or her own way.

I have been a “minority” or one sort or another in many different contexts. (We all have different identities.) In fact, my religious background made me an apostate in my home country (and therefore, killing me would not be a crime – really). I have occasionally suffered because of my ethnicity. And so on. The one part of my life that I kept private for the longest time – and I still do, for the most part – is my private life. I still remember the senior partner in the law firm – son of Holocaust survivors, gave me a brilliant reference when I left – a quarter century ago, walking into my office, telling me that he drove by an AIDS protest, and how he would put all gays against a wall. This was the one and only time I heard him swear, or say anything negative or violent against a class of people (well, other than new law graduates, but that is fairly common among all lawyers).

Bear in mind that a gay man or a lesbian carries all the challenges of “normal” folk, plus this other issue. So yes, we know all about what ordinary folk go through – we are they – but you have not walked in our shoes. So, respectfully, I suggest you give it up.

Yes I have skin in this fight but you don’t and should not need to have to find this attack worrying. You don’t have to be, like me, gay man who has been exposed to the full on “destructive rhetoric” of Same Sex Marriage proponents, including death threats, for my secular mortal sin of disagreeing with their attempts to redefine marriage, to find Mullaly’s article disturbing.

“Malignant cancer, huh. Human Rights. Like the right not to be tortured for political beliefs (as was my cousin); the right not to be summarily executed (as was his brother); the to one’s own belief (yours truly); the right not to be deprived of property, except in accordance with due process of law (my dad); the right not to be subject to genocide (grandfather’s family); the right not to be subject to war crimes or crimes against humanity (my childhood friends – during a nasty war and civil war) …”

now that you mention them, all those horrible things were inaugurated precisely by the French revolution. I recommend you read Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment” which just came out in a beautiful ew English translation 2 years ago

Carlo and Art Deco are right on the money, as far as factual foundation goes.

icarusr, I am a fan of both the French and the Russian revolutions, but let’s admit to well documented facts. Somehow, both revolutions spun out of control in ways that did generate something markedly different than liberty, equality, fraternity, or the great unity of the working classes of the world. That doesn’t mean these ideals are forever discredited, or weren’t worthy of the commitment and sacrifice they inspired. It does mean we need to be very careful about how we pursue them. Those who don’t study history really are in danger of repeating it — at its worst.

“Somehow, both revolutions spun out of control in ways that did generate something markedly different than liberty, equality, fraternity…”

Somehow? Lots of great thinkers have argued that there was a strict logical necessity in that development, due to the flawed metaphysical foundations on which the Revolution tried to build up those ideals. Besides Horkheimer and Adorno (I just checked, the new translation came out in 2007), I will mention Burke, Rosmini, De Maistre, Talmon, Monnerot, Aron, Voegelin, SImone Weil, Del Noce.

In fact, by a deep philosophical necessity every rivendication of freedom that does not recognize a transcendent order of values (such as the current “sexual” revolution) must necessarily lead to greater oppression, inasmuch as the human person is left at the mercy of his/her own instincts, and ultimately at the mercy of what Plato called “the Great Beast” (society).

“Rod, no one thinks you approve of the things on Scottie’s, list, but you have repeatedly plainly said that many should be available to people of “religious conscious.” What is more, you have openly said that the option of criminalizing homosexual behavior should be available. So just exactly why are these pink terrorist tactics so horribly intolerable?”

This is pretty simple. Homosexual behavior may be criminalized because it is behavior. Every community has the inherent right to define permissible and impermissible behaviors. What it may not criminalize, in a free society, is what people are and what they say. So it can not make being a homosexual a crime, nor speaking publicly for the gay agenda. Likewise, the law may criminalize anti-homosexual behavior (beating up homosexuals), but not for being anti-homosexual or speaking against homosexuals and the gay agenda.

It’s a pretty well established distinction. One can not be convicted criminally for being a drug addict or for speaking out in favor of legalizing drugs. One can be for using those drugs. One can’t even be arrested for being a pederast, a cannibal or a murderer, or advocating the same. One can only be arrested upon evidence of the commission of particular acts of pederasty, cannibalism and murder. The law can’t compel anyone to “be” anything other than what they are. Neither should the law punish anyone for what they say or publish – save speech and writing which amounts to a “verbal act”, such as libel, slander or incitement to commit a crime.

Some of you remind me of Plankton from Spongebob Squarepants- railing against the world,while no one takes notice and in poor Plankton’s case,usually squashed. I don’t wish for any of you to be literally squashed but I will be happy when your weak arguments are eventually squashed by the Supreme Court. You will lose and deserve to lose.

Siarlys (this time I got the name right. Apologies for my previous mistake), you say:

“The aptly named case Loving v. Virginia was not about people whose hormones drive them to markedly different sexual contortions, or to different gender combinations. It was about a man marrying a woman, and whether the State of Virginia, which had laws about men marrying women, could tell men which women they could marry and tell women which men they could marry. The human relationship was absolutely identical.

Not so with two gay men, and not so with two gay women, and incidentally, two gay men are not the same relationship as two gay women either.

Now IF the State of Virginia had credible evidence that sex between people with dark skin was substantially different, e.g., if they exchanged germ plasm by inserting the left thumb of the hand in between the big toe and the next toe of the right foot, then there might well be grounds for treating that differently as a matter of law. Also, it would be a moot point to prohibit inter-racial marriage, because the parts wouldn’t match up right.”

Like several other commentators, you start talking about a human relationship (“The aptly named case Loving v. Virginia……The human relationship was absolutely identical (SJ)”)

And then, suddenly, the human relationship becomes defined just by the penis-in-vagina mechanics: (“Not so with two gay men, and not so with two gay women, and incidentally, two gay men are not the same relationship as two gay women either.(SJ)”)

There goes love, affection, companionship, in sickness and in health, raising a family together, supporting each other, all other things that make a human relationship. The definitive characteristic, the one to rule them all is : is there a penis in a vagina?

Oh -I hear some say- but penis in vagina is how we make babies. That’s the difference. We care about making babies.

Yet an 80 years man old can marry a 65 year old woman even though there will not be any babies. But, but,… it is similar, the explanation goes, it has penis in vagina, so it fulfills the definition of the human relationship. Once a penis enters into a vagina, all the other aspects of the relationship will come forth. You see, it’s the teleology.

And yet real gay families with children cannot have the protections and benefits of marriage, because, you know, it is not the same relationship. Love does not matter, mutual support does not matter, raising children does not matter. Without the penis in vagina the teleology is shattered and the human relationship is not there, or so the argument goes.

I am not picking up on you particularly, Siarlys, because I’ve seen this argument many times in these comboxes. But it puzzles me that, in an effort to differentiate gay from straight relationships, social conservatives are willing to toss away with all the “relationship” bits of a human relationship and reduce marriage to the bare bones of answering the question: was there a penis inside a vagina? By doing that they don’t seem to realize that they demean the whole concept of marriage and family as unimportant, mere accidents that do not affect the teleology they so much love to talk about. So once social conservatives declare that marriage is a human relationship based not in love, trust, mutual support and building a family together, but it is a relationship of inserting a penis inside a vagina, and thus gays and lesbians can never, ever, ever, partake of it “because the parts wouldn’t match up right (SJ)”. So those who care about love and family need no longer care about marriage (because marriage teleology is not about love or family or mutual support) while those, like Britney Spears and Jason Allan Alexander, who want to insert a penis inside a vagina, can be married for 55 hours without nary a peep.

I hope more people will start to think more deeply about what the human relationship (your words, Syarlis) of marriage is about, and what are accidents of minor importance. Perhaps they might conclude (I know I did) that love, mutual support and building a family are indeed integral part of the teleology of marriage, while exactly what part from one spouse’s body gets to be placed inside what part of the other spouse’s body will be a mere accident.

Tab2, I have news for you: the idea of ‘gay marriage’ likely never occurred to Martin Luther King or Bayard Rustin at any time between 1911 and 1969.

No doubt doubt you have special insight into the mind of an out-of-the-closet, black man and civil rights leader of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, so I bow to your superior reservoir of wisdom.

Still, it’s hard to imagine that a man so deeply engaged in so many aspects of the fight for freedom and non-violence, from racial justice, to economic justice, to religious freedom and pacifism would remain utterly uninvolved and, as you assert, ignorant of developments in the gay community of the time, especially since he lived in NYC and LA at various times.

I agree that cultural progressives’ desire to have their opinions politically privileged is unconscionable. I’m in favor of absolute free speech _even when it is clearly harmful_ because the alternatives are far worse.

But it also seems to me that, once we’ve ruled out state intervention in the debate, it should be allowed to proceed without either side crying foul. “Tremendous cultural pressure” is exactly what realizes most social norms–conservatives should be well aware of that. If this really is a free debate, one should expect a consensus to emerge that has cultural authority, and that consensus cannot be objectively labelled as illegitimate simply because one’s side in the debate lost.

So you can’t have it both ways. When things like “traditional marriage” are enforced for centuries by tremendous cultural pressure without a peep, you have no principled objection when the pressure shifts directions. And it’s precisely these sorts of cultural vicissitudes that demand the political right to individual conscience be resolutely maintained.

[NFR: To be clear, I don’t think their wish to have their opinions “politically privileged” is unconscionable, but it is unfair, and hypocritical. So many progressives have the false idea that their views are neutral. — RD]

The Vendée is no more… According to your orders, I have trampled their children beneath our horses’ feet; I have massacred their women, so they will no longer give birth to brigands. I do not have a single prisoner to reproach me. I have exterminated them all.
General Westermann

{The repression in the Vendee} not only revealed massacre and destruction on an unprecedented scale but also a zeal so violent that it has bestowed as its legacy much of the region’s identity….The war aptly epitomizes the depth of the conflict…between religious tradition and the revolutionary foundation of democracy.

François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds. A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (1989), p 175

No doubt doubt you have special insight into the mind of an out-of-the-closet, black man and civil rights leader of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, so I bow to your superior reservoir of wisdom.

Not my superior reservoir of wisdom, just my memory. References to something resembling ‘gay marriage’ on the printed page hardly antedate 1987. King died in 1968 and Rustin in 1988. Rustin was the sort of chap who would fellate pick ups in parked cars. He even when cruising around Oslo when he accompanied King on the latter’s trip to collect his Nobel Prize. Domestic life was not his deal.

“Kindly explain how the invasion of the Dutch Republic was somehow NOT a crime attributable to the purveyors of ‘enlightened values’.”

In the name of all that is holy, it is possible, is it not, to not be a fan of the French Revolution and all that it wrought, and not call “human rights” or liberalism “malignant cancer”. I mean, seriously.

Read Burke for one. Read his impeachment of Warren Hastings – one of the most eloquent statements of universality of human rights I have ever come across. Read his comments on the American Revolution – no less a product of the Enlightenment – and there is ample support for the basic principles of liberal democracy right there. Read Burke on Catholicism – there is no better defence of freedom of conscience – in the positive, liberal, empowering sense – before or since. And this same man, this same defender of all that you decry as malignant cancer, also railed against Rousseau before the French Revolution, and denounced the French Revolution when it did happen – in fact, much along the lines of his critique of Rousseau.

Discussing whether the invasion of the Dutch Republic represents the totality of liberalism and liberal thought is, frankly, a pointless enterprise. I lived through a revolution that had, as its basic slogan, “freedom and independence”. Freedom was the first thing to go, literally three days after the revolutionaries won. The only person I know who blames the disaster of the post-revolutionary period to “freedom” is my Fascist uncle. (I am not being pejorative: he belonged to the Neo-Fascist Party in Italy; he believes, like you do, that “liberty” and “human rights” are malignant cancers for social cohesion, order and the arts. Incidentally, he is also deeply antireligious – our big fights are not about gay marriage – he believes marriage is a conservative value and so wants all gays to be married – but about freedom of conscience. I, the liberal, have no problem with Rod’s Christianity, or my cousin’s Orthodox Jewish or fanatical Muslim beliefs – yes, I have the whole range in the family – but he considers fanatical religion in any garb to be deleterious to the social order and cohesion and, guess what, he thinks my tolerance allows the cancer of fanaticism to grow. And so on.)

Do I think Rousseau is and was full of s**t? Of course. Does that mean that I think Cheney is right for defending “enhanced interrogation”? Of course not.

For a true measure of liberal thought, you should do well to actually read modern liberal thought – start with Berlin. It is possible, you will see, to believe in participatory democracy without the General Will; to consider, as a matter of social and economic policy, that massive income equality is not healthy, without massive expropriations; that while the Rousseauan dictum, “Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains”, in its abstract sense may lead to misfortune, in its concrete sense gives you the anti-slave-trade laws of the UK and the Emancipation Proclamation (or do you think these were malignant cancers as well?).

You seem to be suggesting that the state can criminalize anything so long as the actus reus requirement is satisfied. So, under your theory, the state could make it criminal for gay people to leave their homes during daylight hours. After all, they’re not being punished for their status (being gay) but for their conduct (going out in public).

What you’re essentially proposing is that a majority may induce the state to criminalize any conduct that it doesn’t like, without regard to the motivation. While you may well desire such a regime, that’s not the one we’ve ever lived under in this country.

My two closest couple-friends are very much straight and very much childless, as a matter of choice. I have never asked what they do in the bedroom – for all I know, they have never engaged in sex that could lead to children in the first place. The women are long past the child-bearing age, and I have not seen an iota less of affection or love between them couples.

I was not a partisan of SSM as such – for all the cultural reasons that Weiland eloquently puts forward, I considered marriage as essentially a hetero institution. But then, personally, I have no truck with the notion of “gay community” – any more than it is possible to talk about a “straight community” without meaningless overbreadth – because I reject the essentialism of homosexual orientation: my attraction to other men has had no impact on my choice of career, where I live, relationship with family and friends, what books I read and, I hope, how I contribute to society.

So, I could easily be persuaded that civil union is a good “compromise” – given that what I really want is for my partner to be treated in the same way as my childless friends’ partners after my demise. But, going back to Weiland, we also live in a culture that values symbols. You can’t extol marriage as an institution, as conservatives do, turn around to gays and say, “you can’t have this”, and then claim that civil union and marriage are the same and so gays should just shut up about it. I mean, one could do that, but one risks serious cognitive dissonance: either marriage is a social good or it is not; if it is, denying it to a minority is problematic; if it is not, then what is the issue?

And, frankly, I came around to SSM because of conservative overreaction: surely, if this institution is so important, then denying it to gay couples who want it is discriminatory. I say this, even as I am in a common law relationship and not likely to marry, and even as my closest gay couple friends are also unlikely to marry, mostly for ideological reasons. And, of course, the more the discussion descends into silliness, the more my partisanship strengthens. Look above. Someone actually wrote what s/he thought was a persuasive debate-ending post on adoption. It ended with something along the lines of “there are long lines for adoption by straights, so why give them thar gays any babies to care for.” Right there is essentialism taken to such an extreme that I have to stand athwart the march of nonsense and scream, “No!”

I must thank Carlo and J_A for permitting be to distinguish myself from several herds at once, by responding to disparate criticisms. Carlo, I credit with being genuinely conservative; J_A may be liberal or libertarian, but definitely not “left.”

J_A seems to presume that I am a “social conservative” because I don’t buy into the constitutional argument that states MUST mandatorily license, regulate, and tax gay couples, and call them a marriage. This, despite the fact that I argue strenuously for the integrity of Lawrence v. Texas, also of Roe v. Wade, support the Affordable Care Act, and favor a sharp increase in the minimum wage. Also, I am fine with the state of New York VOTING to license the gay minority of their fellow citizens under the name “marriage.”

J_A, as Annette Gordon Reed wrote in her definite work on The Hemmingses of Monticello, marriage is about much more than sex, but sex is part of the bargain. Love, trust, mutual support, are beautiful things, but the government does not license, regulate, and tax every human relationship that involves love, trust, and mutual support. For some reason, the specific liaison between man and woman has in all or nearly all human societies been singled out for special attention.

You seem eager to remove sex from the equation, so as to establish universality, then put sex back into the equation to demand that unlike many other human relationships that involve love, trust, and mutual support, gay couples MUST be licensed as a marriage. The factual and logical incongruity is glaring — so glaring you are blinded to what from a slight distance is most obvious.

You also took a rapid two-stop away from the way I refuted Bobby’s banal attempt to draw an analogy out of Loving v. Virginia. All of a sudden, racial prejudice is absent from your argument, its all about “love, trust, mutual support.”

There is no question, biologically, that sexual hormones and emotions exist BECAUSE our species has two sexes, and that this arose as a mechanism for reproduction. More than that is not needed to rationally justify distinct and exclusive legal attention to the relationship of male and female, and to disregard irrelevant side effects. There is no reason, except in your perverse desire to sustain the unsustainable, to go into intimate detail about sexual organs and the presence or absence of babies.

William Dalton is, for the most part, correct about the legal distinction between being and behavior, except that there ARE areas of behavior that OUR constitution restrains from the reach of criminal legislation.

On to Carlo: I am well aware that many commentators with learned pedigrees have pronounced that the excesses and deviations of the French and Russian revolutions were inherent in the nature of the goals and methods from the beginning of both revolutions. The lesson I would draw is not the Burkean conclusion that revolutions are always worse than the evils they overthrow. Rather, nobody should undertake to initate a revolution who is not prepared to rapidly put in place new social, cultural, political, and economic institutions that are capable of sustaining the lives and securing the allegiance of the vast majority of citizens. One reason the American Revolution turned out relatively well is that organs of self-government (some more patrician than others) existed and were the framework of the revolution itself. Still, it was a near thing… congress was corrupt, military veterans came close to overthrowing congress and establishing military rule (as actually happened in many Latin American nations).

I don’t agree that “liberty, equality, fraternity” or interntional proletarian solidarity are incapable of being the moral foundations of productive, sustaining, human societies. On the other hand, a revolution does create a power vacuum, and all manner of misfits and charlatans will rush to fill it under the banner of the revolution, who must be quickly sidelined, without opening the door to permanent dictatorship. A dicey balancing act, for sure.

Have you read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress? When a conservative libertarian like Robert A. Heinlein can write of protagonists ranging from Randian anarchists to post-third international communists making a successful revolution, there is bound to be some food for thought in the mix.

The point that siarlys is making isn’t that heterosexual sex is all that defines the relationship, but that heterosexual sex is what *differentiates* the relationship. Please tell me why I can’t marry my father and inherit his estate tax-free and receive social security survivor benefits, according to our new definition of marriage? What consistent logic will be applied to exclude us and discriminate against our compassionate, loving, committed, beautiful relationship?

Further, siarlys isn’t necessarily making a case for why we should or should not extend recognition to same sex relationships, but simply demonstrating why the constitution does not require that we do so, which in a sane world it clearly does not. Unfortunately, our world is far less sane than it has been in the past.

Someone argued above that opposite-sex companionship marriage is the traditional ideal. This is just flatly wrong. To the extent that there’s any singular notion of traditional marriage, it’s procreative marriage. In contrast, a companionship marriage is the kind of marriage that gay people once entered into: They married a close opposite-sex friend, while having little intention of engaging in an active sexual relationship. In that sense, companionship marriages were non-traditional marriages entered into for pragmatic reasons. For example, when I was growing up, our neighbors had a companionship marriage. The husband was a well regarded cardiologist, but was also gay. He married one of his closest female friends from high school. They were opposite-sex housemates, who even maintained separate bedrooms. Their “marriage” consisted of little more than a license; no other traditional indicia of marriage were present. It was a marriage of practical convenience. There was no way he could have built a successful medical practice in the 70s and 80s as an openly gay cardiologist. So, he chose to pursue his professional at the expense of entering into the sort of partnership he would have desired.

Professionally successful gays are no longer forced into such Faustian bargains. As the stigma against homosexuality has receded, same-sex marriage has emerged as a more preferable alternative to companionship marriage for those of us who are gay.

As James Antle noted in his article last December, there is no way to separate the issue of same-sex marriage from the perceived social status of being openly gay. The effort to prevent legal recognition of same-sex marriages is inseparable from (if not emblematic of) a desire to restigmatize homosexuality and force socially respectable gay people back into the closet. After all, the Folsom Street crowd isn’t looking to get married. In fact, the 20-somethings who inhabit the gay club scene aren’t looking for marriage. No. It’s the gay doctors, the gay lawyers, the gay engineers, the gay accountants, the gay stockbrokers, and the like, who are looking to get married. And that’s where the rub lies. Once respectable gay professionals start coming out en masse, it becomes a lot harder for would-be bigots to hide under a veil of apparent respectability. Once the veil is removed, the bigots will either need to repent or share the fate of white supremacists.

As James Antle noted in his article last December, there is no way to separate the issue of same-sex marriage from the perceived social status of being openly gay.

It’s not the first time James Antle has been wrong, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. The way seems wide open to me: Lawrence v. Texas is good law, on privacy grounds, not on equal protection grounds — which the court rejected, despite Justice O’Connor’s rather self-serving concurrence (she just didn’t want to admit being in error on Bowers v. Hardwick). <Goodridge and its imitators are sloppy nonsense with holes big enough to drive a Mack truck through. Gays have a right to live their lives, and not be fired, mocked, spat upon, or denied public service. What they share may or may not be recognized by society as a marriage.

Bobby, when social conservatives claimed Lawrence opened the door to legal incest, bestiality, etc. etc. etc., I mocked the strained logic and warned, be careful what you wish for, you might get it. I find your apocalyptic rhetoric equally strained, and dangerous, for the same reason.

I don’t much care what the “traditional ideal” of marriage is or was. The law need take no notice of that. Whatever the ideal is, however many ideals there are, however well people live up to or fall short of these ideals, marriage is about the objective relationship of male to female. That’s quite empirical, no spirituality or romanticism required. Most of us think it goes better with romance, affection, mutual support, etc., but as MBrown so succinctly points out, the relationship of male to female is what DIFFERENTIATES marriage from any number of other human relationships, which may or may not be companionate.

Simone Weil was eminently aware of the flaws of postrevolutionary France and the evils of the Bolsheviks, but she was equally clear about her support for the ideals both of republicanism and Marxism, and I think she said something to the effect of ‘Marxism has tons of problems, but it is still the best theory of human society we have’.

IcarusR,

Your uncle sounds fascinating, to be honest, I’d like to meet him sometime. I’ve been very impressed with your own contributions on this blog too.

On a more serious note, how are we supposed to take seriously the musings of a man who calls himself Pandora Panti-Bliss?

The question is always if those words have any metaphysical or religious foundation, i.e. if they reflect some objective order of reality that reason can recognize or if, on the contrary, they are just acts of the will (i.e. political slogans, ultimately).

You can argue that in the case of the French revolution they expressed a theistic, Rousseauian, but I would respond that that was a very tenuous foundation, and carried its own risks for the few people who took it seriously. Not by chance Robespierre himself was probably quite serious about it, and the results were quite tragic.

Your famiily had an enviable range [ which I suspect made thinga fun! ]. But there is perhaps one position it did not have: an ultraconservative Confucianist who would point out how many of the world’s problems are the result of allowing Individual Autonomy and would have been avoided by simply banning Individual Autonomy. I rather liked having a stodgy Aunt.

Either Liberalism accepts the limits of Sovereignty or it does not.

Starting with the word UNIVERSAL im UNIVERSAL declaration of human rights,it strikes me as obvious that it does not accept limitations to its own application.
From there flows all the rest of its wickedness.

It goes cross-country. It invades. Just like Islamism.

‘ It is possible, you will see, to believe in participatory democracy without the General Wil’

I am NOT in favour of participatory government. Please don’t mistake me for Lord Karth – I am perfectly content to remain a non-voting peasant.

‘as a matter of social and economic policy, that massive income equality is not healthy, without massive expropriations.’

I don’t know about that. Strictly enforce sumptuary laws – problems solved. As a matter of Environmental policy, having 1% of the people driving a SUV is bad enough, but 100% is even worse.

‘ “Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains”’
Man is NOT born free, and is NOT entitled to be free either.

‘in its concrete sense gives you the anti-slave-trade laws of the UK and the Emancipation Proclamation (or do you think these were malignant cancers as well?).’

Mind you, we could have skipped some 200 years of slavery before that by simply sticking to Bartolome de las Casas and rejecting the reasoning of Juan de Sepulveda – thanks. A surplus of individual liberty CAUSED the whole slavery issue.

‘Discussing whether the invasion of the Dutch Republic represents the totality of liberalism and liberal thought is, frankly, a pointless enterprise. ‘

Selling drugs once does not represent the totality of a drug dealer’s life. But nonetheless one such trade is reason enough to send him to the Gallows.

‘ I lived through a revolution that had, as its basic slogan, “freedom and independence”.’

Revolutions happen when people are not being docile SUBJECTS. So, yes,in a real sense,I suppose your Uncle has a point.
But the deeper cause is people refusing to be docile subjects.

Each and everyone of us is born in a society which exists and functions by the grace of Mos Maiorum [ which is local by definition ] – all we need to do is conform. And moral behaviour is just that: strict adherence to customary standards.

Now, either Liberalism is an uncompromising defender of customary standards, or it is a pernicious plague.

she changed her mind about Marxism in the late 1930’s actually. Rememeber what she wrote already in “Oppression and liberty”:

“Marx purely and simply attributed to social matter this movement towards good through contradictions which Plato described as being that of the thinking creature drawn upwards by the supernatural operation of grace.”

Hence, Marx views matter as a machine capable of producing goodness. But here lies his delusion: therefore Marxism is nothing but “… a system according to which the relationships of force that define the social structure entirely determine both man’s destiny and his thoughts. Such a system is ruthless. Force counts for everything there; it leaves no hope for justice. It does not even leave the hope of conceiving justice in its truth, since all that thoughts do is to reflect the relationships of force.”

After that she never changed her mind, as you can see in all her later works.

Re: After that she never changed her mind, as you can see in all her later works.

I’ve read THE NEED FOR ROOTS multiple times, which was the latest of her works. Sure, she was critical of a lot of elements of Marxism, primarily that it didn’t sufficiently ground its moral foundations in a transcendent order. But she retained a belief that Marx was indispensable to understanding society and history. And she maintained a belief, right up to writing THE NEED FOR ROOTS, that private property should be extremely restricted (pretty much, to the level of the small peasant or artisan), and that larger enterprises should be state- or cooperatively-owned.

Which is to say, her strong criticisms of Marxist theory, her vision of the economy in her ideal society would bear a lot more similarities to Yugoslavia or even Hungary than it would to the United States or Japan.

If it gives you any comfort, please know that I wasn’t speaking to you. Frankly, I generally find your reasons for opposing SSM to be utterly incoherent. Your rationale essentially amounts to: “It is wrong because I think it’s wrong.” Well, you’re entitled to that opinion, even one that’s incoherent and unpersuasive.

HeartRight, I find your stated universalism more dangerous than any of the other universalisms you disparage — although most of them have their own problems.

Carlo, not having made it a priority to study Simone Weil, from your references and Hector’s, it seems quite plausible that she said a lot of different things, at different times, not necessarily all consistent or in neat chronological order. She wouldn’t be the first human being to be somewhat inconsistent in her public utterances.

Is there a metaphysical foundation to the concepts of liberty, equality, fraternity? Probably yes. Can I pin these to the doctrines of any particular faith? Probably not. Within almost any given religious faith, you will find advocates of liberty, and of suppressing individual autonomy. Certainly that is true of the RC’s, and even of the Calvinists, given that Calvinists had a significant role in the American Revolution, along with the Deists, Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, and Jews.

Is it dangerous for any political leader to pronounced that liberty is “what I say it is”? Absolutely.

Hey, I just had an original thought: Is Breda O’Brien free to defend her faith? In public? Or are her thoughts and words beyond the pale, to be suppressed as inimical to the rights of those who find them offensive?

“Which is to say, her strong criticisms of Marxist theory, her vision of the economy in her ideal society would bear a lot more similarities to Yugoslavia or even Hungary than it would to the United States or Japan.”

She utterly disliked the USA. Near the end of her life she stated that the greatest looming danger after the war would be the “Americanization” of Europe, and she was probably correct.

But in fact, she moved past seeking to describe an ideal society. In her last years, her dominant concern became philosophical: the way to move past Marx would not be some form of social democracy, but rather a return to Plato.

Most importantly, she also became very critical of the Enlightenment’s idea of human rights. If you never did it, please read the first ten pages of “L’enracinement” (The search for roots). Very strong stuff.

“Is there a metaphysical foundation to the concepts of liberty, equality, fraternity? Probably yes. Can I pin these to the doctrines of any particular faith? Probably not.”

And why do you need to pin it to any specific faith? As long as you understand that the tragedy of contemporary liberalism is that it tries to hold up these ideals while holding metaphusical views that utterly contradict them (positivism, instrumentalism, scientism). Then you will understand why it must lead to the opposite result of what it intends (oppression rather than liberation).

I did not read carefully one of you post. The Need for Roots, which you read, is indeed the English title of L’enracinement. My reading of her argument is not that Marxism just lacks religious foundations. Rather, it really denies the specifically human element, and thus must contribute to uprooting the masses.

But in fact, it is telling that Marx really does not show up very often in her later works, because she had essentially given up on him.

I pretty much agree with what Simone Weil said in that bit which Carlo quoted. Placing faith in material processes and power struggles to inevitably bring about utopia, without paying attention to specifically moral questions, is almost guaranteed to end badly. Without decent men running the show, a command economy is more likely to lead you to neo-Asiatic despotism than it is to anything that Marx would have recognized as communism.

My grandfather had owned about 5000 of those. Literally. Not fun when his henchmen beat them up for looking up. Literally. Sorry, I stopped reading the rest of your post after this line. Literally. No point arguing with a self-declared contented peasant. Seriously. Good luck with your Aunt.

On the positive side, you have painted such an unattractive picture of antiliberalism that I suspect even Rod would recoil.

Sorry I didn’t make it clearer. yes, I think Simone Weil was one of the most interesting and powerful thinkers of the last century, and reading her works (which I did when I was about 20) was influential in converting me to Christianity.

I think we probably agree here on more than we disagree. You can read Simone Weil from a conservative perspective (as you do) or a socialist one (as I do) but she has important stuff to tell both of us. and I think her criticism of the Enlightenment concept of human rights is dead on. The command ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ is so much richer, deeper and more compelling than ‘Respect the human rights of your neighbor’, and in fact the second is just a dumbed down, multilated version of the first. I suspect Christianity will long outlast the Enlightenment view of human rights, as she suggested in, I think it was, ‘On Human Personality’.

There is in our law the principle of equal protection. The law can’t punish “gay” people for doing things which others may legally do, unless there is a rational justification for denying them that right (e.g., we forbid people under 21 from imbibing alcohol upon evidence that younger people are more likely to act irresponsibly under the influence). People, gay or straight, may be arrested for walking the streets trolling for sex, but not just for walking the street.

And while some statutes are drawn to impose strict liability for some crimes (e.g., water pollution), I believe in the principle that every criminal conviction should require proof of “mens rea” – criminal intent.

Having had the recent example of how liberal motives impelled Sarko and Cammie to bomb Libya, [ Cross Country once more! ] the sooner liberalism is removed root-and-branch from this planet, the better.

But I’m sure that you could come up with a rational reason for forcing gay people to stay indoors during daylight hours. That’s why the courts have generally required that the action not merely be rational, but be rationally related to a legitimate governmental interest.

Hector and Carlo: I prefer the term civil rights to human rights, because it is more accurate. Civil rights define the legal relationship of citizen to state, and should not be expected to sustain anything higher or greater than that. The rights of man (generic, including woman), if they exist, would indeed require some higher authority, AT LEAST acceptance of the Golden Rule as mandatory. Man does not have rights because the National Convention said so, although the National Convention could well acknowledge that man has rights the state may not contravene. There is a difference.

HeartRight: Say what?

But I’m sure that you could come up with a rational reason for forcing gay people to stay indoors during daylight hours.

The Irish were some of the most intensely Catholic people in Europe a generation ago…

Yeah, well, read Rod’s old Beliefnet column, “The Damnable Bishops of Ireland.” The Irish were also some of the most disciplined and obedient people in Europe a generation ago, as far as respect for priesthood was concerned. Betray that trust, you may find the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater.